This invention relates to dispensers for holding a plurality of beads and delivering the beads singly, one by one, upon turning of a manually rotatable element on the dispenser.
A variety of products, including (without limitation) cosmetics, drugs, nutritional supplements and foods, are commonly prepared in the form of capsules or other similarly shaped and sized bodies (e.g. pills, pellets, and tablets) which are at least externally solid and are self-sustaining in shape under normal storage conditions but may be more or less fragile when subjected to impacts or handled roughly. The term “beads” herein embraces such capsules, pills, pellets, tablets and the like.
A typical container for beads is constituted of a receptacle for holding a plurality of the beads and a removable lid or cap for closing the receptacle. To obtain one or more beads from the container, a user may take off the lid and tilt the open receptacle to cause beads to fall out, or reach into the receptacle to remove beads with the fingers.
Such operations present problems in that tilting of an open receptacle may cause an undesired excess of beads to fall out, while manual extraction of beads from within the receptacle is often manipulatively difficult. In either case, there is danger that beads not intended to be withdrawn may be contaminated by contact with surfaces outside the container or with the user's fingers inside the container. If the beads are of low strength (as exemplified, in particular, by some cosmetic capsules), attempted extraction with the fingers may damage or break them.
Bead dispensers have heretofore been proposed for overcoming these difficulties by providing for individual discharge of single beads from a container, i.e., one at a time. Such devices, however, may not reliably ensure desired single-bead discharge, may be structurally complex or inconveniently complicated to manipulate, and may exert sufficient force or pressure on the beads to cause disruption, damage or breakage, for instance if the beads are weak or tend to become stuck to each other and/or to the container in which they are held.